Fire And Ice
Authors: Diana Palmer
Like the heroine of one of her romances, bestselling author Margie Silver was willing to rise to Cal Van Dyne’s challenge. The arrogant tycoon vowed that Margie’s sister would not marry his younger brother, and Margie was just as determined that the wedding would take place. Margie expected Cal’s assault but not the cynical game of love he played with her on his lavish Florida estate. Suddenly Margie was gambling with her sister’s future—and her own—with a passionate adversary who made his own rules… until he met his match.
FIRE AND ICE
Diana Palmer
Table of Contents
One
M
argie Silver had known she would draw interested glances from male diners in the exclusive Atlanta restaurant where she sat waiting. The vivid color of the green satin dress she wore was stunning enough in itself, but the cut was its real attraction. Long-sleeved, the wraparound dress had a plunging neckline, and its front edges were joined only by a wide belt at the waist. The effect, with Margie’s long black hair and green eyes, was dynamite. The skirt peeked open to above the knee, revealing long, graceful sheer nylon stockings, that tapered down to small feet in sexy black high heels.
She sipped a glass of ginger ale, held in long, artistic fingers with pink-tipped nails. Margie might have looked like a high-fashion model, but she made her living writing sensuous historical romance novels as the notorious Silver McPherson. She wasn’t allowed to mention that fact tonight, however, because revelation of her flamboyant alter ego might put a damper on her sister Jan’s new romance. She had a hunch that this spur-of-the-moment dinner invitation cloaked a confrontation with Jan’s future brother-in-law, the tycoon, and Margie had deliberately set out to provoke, choosing her dress to startle.
Margie’s full red lips pursed irritatedly. She’d been in the middle of writing a particularly difficult scene when Jan called, breathlessly demanding to be met at the restaurant at seven. It was now half past seven, Jan was nowhere in sight, and Margie was furious.
She shifted in her chair, looking down at the satin dress in amusement. Jan would be horrified. She’d tried to impress on Margie the Van Dynes’ very conservative public image, and the older brother’s opinion of brassy women. She’d cautioned her older sister to be demure and had suggested that she dress like a nun. So naturally, Margie, being Margie and hating anything that sounded like an order, dragged out her brassiest dress and proceeded to use makeup like a sixty-year-old tart on the town.
Imagining Jan’s reaction—to say nothing of young Andrew Van Dyne’s and his elder brother’s—made her eyes sparkle. If Jan had really sprung an impromptu meeting between them, Margie was going to enjoy herself.
“Oh, Margie, please act your age!” Jan would groan when Margie did something characteristically zany—like standing that nude statue of Venus in the middle of the flower garden where poor old Mrs. James would be shocked by it every afternoon on her way to water her own flowers. At least the photo inside the cover of her latest novel,
Blazing Passion
, was only of her face—Margie had threatened to have it done in a negligee, and Jan had threatened to leave the country.
But Margie would go right ahead living as she pleased and thinking up new ways to shock Jan. Margie’s brief marriage had been responsible for much of that wild behavior. Her zaniness was a kind of camouflage to keep the world at bay, to cover her vulnerability. The sudden death of her husband after two long months of marriage had been almost a relief, leaving her disillusioned about men and intimacy and marriage. It had taught her one very real lesson—that you never knew other people until you lived with them. And she had every reason in the world to remember it.
She’d thought herself in love with Larry Silver. He was young and seemed to have a pleasant personality and a promising future as an attorney. They dated briefly, got married and soon discovered that they were completely unsuited to one another. When he died in a plane crash two months later, she had felt more guilt-ridden over the failed marriage than heartbroken. That had happened five years ago, when Margie was just twenty; she hadn’t taken life seriously since. It was, she told Jan, mental suicide to be serious, although she often thought that her younger sister saw right through her.
She took another sip of the ginger ale and sighed. If Jan and Andy didn’t arrive in the next ten minutes, she was leaving. She had a month left to meet her publisher’s deadline, and she didn’t have time for socializing with strangers. Despite Jan’s growing attachment to Andy, Margie had no desire to meet his brother.
She glared around her, feeling trapped. She knew “the tycoon,” as she had dubbed him, disapproved of his brother’s involvement with Jan. Jan was working as a legal secretary. The tycoon, however, wanted his brother matched with the debutante daughter of some Chicago society friends—not a nameless little Atlanta secretary. The debutante’s people were in retail clothing, while the Van Dynes were clothing manufacturers. It would be a merger made in heaven for Andrew’s brother.
She felt a tingling at the back of her neck, and turned to find herself staring into the piercing dark eyes of a man in the doorway. The impact of those scowling eyes, even across the width of the room, almost made her drop her glass. She’d never seen eyes like that, in a face like that. The man was huge, and he had a broad, hard face that might have been carved out of teak. His eyes were instantly hostile. Margie found herself fascinated by them. Why should a total stranger stare at her like that, with such open antagonism?
The disapproval on his face amused her and without thinking, she pursed her full lips and formed a very visible kiss, batting her long eyelashes and then sending him a come-hither smile before she turned back around.
She put down her glass to smother an attack of laughter. The look on that man’s face had been worth gold. Bored and irritated herself, she was just beginning to enjoy this. Jan was going to be horrified when she learned how her sister had been passing the time.
A shadow fell across her, and she looked up to find the stranger looming over her with a face so stern it would have stopped traffic.
“Well, if it isn’t Mount Rushmore,” Margie murmured with a wicked smile. She half turned, leaning one arm over the back of her chair to look him up and down. “Sit down, honey, and have a drink with me.”
He didn’t smile. He looked as if he never had. His eyes wandered over her with growing disapproval. “No thanks. I have a prior engagement with a young lady.” He stressed the last word, as if to imply that it could not be applied to Margie.
She liked his voice immediately. It was deep and faintly rough, very masculine and cultured. “Blind date?” She laughed.
He shook his head. “Social obligation,” he said as though it were a distasteful one.
“Well, I’m a native,” she drawled. “I might know her.”
He looked as if he seriously doubted that. “Her name is Janet Banon.”
Margie blinked. “Jan’s my sister,” she said without thinking, sitting up straight. Her eyes sized him up again, registering the returning hostility in his face. “What do you want with my sister?”
Instead of answering, he pulled out a chair and sat down as if he owned the table. He signaled a nearby waiter. “Bring me a scotch on the rocks,” he told the white-jacketed waiter. “And a…Tom Collins for the lady,” he added, glancing at the tall glass in her hand.
“Yes, sir,” the waiter said politely, departing.
“And I take back the last word of that sentence,” the man told Margie evenly. “A lady doesn’t make blatant advances to strange men in restaurants.”
Margie’s green eyes sparkled. “You wrong me, sir,” she said in her best Georgia drawl. “When I make advances to a man, I always take my clothes off first.”
He cocked an eyebrow, appraising the expanse of skin visible in the long slit of her neckline. “I can’t imagine that that would give you any advantage,” he said flatly.
Always conscious of her small measurements, she glared at him. “Are you always so forthright?” she asked.
“Play with fire and you get burned,” he replied curtly. His dark eyes pinned hers. “I don’t like permissive women who dress like tarts. Nor do I care for women who get drunk before a meal and solicit men.”
“How dare you…!” she began tritely, lost for words.
“Shut up,” he said with the kind of authority that commanded instant obedience, even from renegade romance authors.
He paused until the waiter, depositing their drinks along with a check, had departed before he lifted his dark head to glare at her. “I understand that my brother wants to marry your sister. Over my dead body.”
She gave him a quick glance. “Andrew’s older brother?” she asked politely. “The one who makes women’s underthings?” she added with a wicked smile.
If she had hoped to embarrass him, she didn’t succeed. He leaned back in his chair, sipping his scotch, watching her with unblinking dark eyes. “We make a superior line of undergarments,” he replied. His gaze fell once again on the bodice of her dress. “Along with a lightly padded bra that would do wonders for you.”
The ginger ale sloshed out of the glass all over her napkin and part of the tablecloth, while her face flushed for the first time in five years.
“You’ll have to excuse God for my shortcomings; he threw me together between wars,” she growled.
He flexed his broad shoulders, and she noticed for the first time the elegant cut of his evening clothes, and how well black and white suited him. He was a fashion plate—not quite handsome, not really young—but hardly over the hill, either. Margie judged him to be about forty, or slightly under. Those hard lines in his face were the marks of high pressure, not age. He had the look of a human bulldozer.
“Why isn’t your sister here?” he asked coldly.
Margie also leaned back, staring at him. “Jan didn’t give me any explanations. She asked me to meet her here at seven and hung up. You know as much about it as I do. Probably more,” she added wickedly. “I understand you tell your brother what clothes to put on every morning when he gets up. Do you also tell him which girls to date?”
His head tilted slightly to one side and his eyes narrowed. “Shall I be blunt?” he asked quietly. “Your sister would fit into my family the way a dormouse would fit into a cat convention. My world—and Andrew’s—is best described as a social round of civilized warfare. Your sister, from what I’ve seen, couldn’t fight her way out of a domestic dispute.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Margie replied thoughtfully. “She used to play tackle football when we were kids, and she still tells
me
what to do.”
“You look as if you could use some guidance,” he replied with maddening carelessness, staring pointedly at the dress.
“It’s a designer dress,” she returned.
“It would probably look better on the designer.”
“He’s a man.”
“Exactly.”
She took a deep breath and her eyes glittered. “Well, Mr. Undergarment Tycoon, you’ll just have to excuse me. It’s pretty obvious Jan got me here to meet you, and now that I’ve had that dubious honor, I’m going home.”
She started to stand up, but a steely hand caught her wrist and jerked her back down. She was startled as much by the unexpected action as by the tingle of pleasure that ran up her arm at his touch.
“Not yet,” he said in a deep, low tone. “My brother isn’t marrying your sister. I’ll see to it.”
“I couldn’t be more pleased,” she replied hotly. “Because I don’t want bad blood in my family, either!”
“Watch it, honey. I bite,” he cautioned.
“On the neck?” she asked with a venomous smile.
“Andy and I are going down to Florida to visit our mother for a few weeks,” he mused. “That should cool his ardor. And I don’t think there’s much danger of your sister following him.”
“Why?” Margie demanded. “Because she’s a secretary with a low bank balance?”